Johnny Rebs’ serves up the hearty South in SoCal

There are Southern-style restaurants and barbecue shops spread across Southern California. Not a lot, but enough when you feel the need for some ribs and some grits. But I do not believe any of them offer a menu with the length, breadth and depth of the one found at the two branches of Johnny Rebs’ Southern Roadhouse.

Where many places are content to offer a handful of dishes for lunch and dinner — and often the same chow during both mealtimes — Johnny Rebs’ serves an encyclopedic menu of dishes. I’ve traveled through the South, usually in search of one dish or another — from baby backs, pulled pork, fried chicken and the like — and the number of restaurants that offer more than a few options are not many.

Johnny Rebs’ Southern Roadhouse

Cuisine: A pair of rollicking barbecue joints for Southern-style ribs, with a lively crowd, lively servers, big portions and food that tastes as good the next day as it does when you’re served in the restaurant.

Considering the menu at Johnny Rebs’, you do have to wonder how the heck they do it. Their kitchens must have warehouse-sized cold storage and a crew that knows how to crank it all out. At Johnny Rebs’, the food always arrives like it’s on fire. It’s a fine place to go with kids and their short attention spans. There’s so much to see, so much to do and so much to eat.

It begins with breakfast, which in the American South is a meal of substance. The options for breakfast at Johnny Rebs’ begin with something called “Country Morning.” Talk about modest understatement. The dish includes two eggs (any style), fresh-baked biscuits, spuds or grits — and then you get a choice of some 15 significant proteins. I’m talking chicken-fried steak smothered in a gravy so thick it’s almost a solid. I’m talking about barbecue beef and barbecue pork. I’m talking about a blackened sirloin. And that’s about a quarter of the breakfast menu.

You want a breakfast appetizer before your Country Morning? They’ve got nine of them including hush puppies flavored with jalapenos, cornmeal-fried pickles, onion rings with barbecue sauce, fried okra and, yup, fried green tomatoes. They also make breakfast sandwiches with their biscuits.

There’s plenty of overlap between lunch and dinner, except that lunch is when Johnny Rebs’ offers its Specials (from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.), which are smaller plates that cost about a third less than their dinner incarnations. The thing is, smaller at Johnny Rebs’ isn’t small. Not even close.

Whether you go for lunch or dinner, this is Southern cooking, some of which is straight out of Dixie, and some of which has come west for a bit of a vacation. Though I may be wrong, I suspect the selection of salads are more for our delicate SoCal tastebuds than the heartier dining habits of the South. Would they understand a catfish Caesar salad down on the bayou? Or a bourbon-glazed salmon salad with blue cheese? Can’t say for sure. But I suspect not.

On the other hand, they’ll feel right at home with the cornmeal-fried catfish (“two filets of Mississippi goodness,” says the menu); the sausage plate of Cajun, Texas hot and boudin; the Southern-fried chicken, crazy crisp and heavy with spice; and the various pulled meats and ribs. I prefer the pork ribs to the beef ribs. Though when I can’t make up my mind, there’s the Combo BBQ, the Carolina Combo and the Pork Out.

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To wash it down, there’s sweet tea, which makes my teeth vibrate. There’s also beer, including Newcastle Brown (talk about a stranger in a strange land), and wine. I drink beer with my barbecue as a rule.

And I’d like to say I always leave room for the banana pudding, but both my legs are full by then.